62 • BOHR, NIELS
at fault for not having sent reinforcements out early, even if there
had been a wish not to appear provocative. TheElgin Commission
discovered that, whereas the Boers had spent £170,000 annually on
secret service, GeneralSir John Ardaghhad asked for only £10,000
and had been allowed a mere £100. One result of this postmortem
was a readiness to prepare contingency plans for a war in Europe,
which necessitated the creation of a Secret Service Bureau.BOHR, NIELS.The winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for physics, Niels
Bohr was one of the leading scientists of his generation. Bohr re-
mained in Copenhagen after the Nazi occupation of 1940, but in Oc-
tober 1943 he cooperated with British Intelligence and was
exfiltrated to Sweden, where he was placed on a clandestine flight to
Scotland so he could join the Manhattan Project. He reported that in
September 1941 he had been visited by the leading German physi-
cist, Werner Heisenberg, and had conducted an ambiguous conversa-
tion about the possibility of creating a nuclear weapon.
At Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he worked under the alias
Nicholas Baker, Bohr was troubled by the ethics of an American mo-
nopoly on an atomic bomb and pressed for the Soviets to be included
in the research. He returned to London to persuadeWinston
Churchill, who warned his scientific adviser that he believed Bohr
was on the brink of ‘‘mortal crimes’’ and that preparations should be
made for his detection if he contacted the Soviets.
At the end of the war, Bohr returned to Denmark, where he was
approached by the Soviets for information, but he declined to cooper-
ate. Bohr’s two controversial conversations, with Heisenberg in 1941
and Yakov Terletsky and Lev Vasilevsky in 1945, have been the sub-
ject of much speculation, several books, and a successful play,Co-
penhagen.
BOLERO.Code word for a committee created in 1942 by the War Cab-
inet to coordinate security arrangements with the United States forces
based in Britain. The committee met at Norfolk House and was
chaired bySir Findlater Stewart. The British side was heavily rep-
resented byMI5(a contingent led by thedirector-general of the
Security Service,Sir David Petrie, and consisting of Brigadier
Allen, Jasper Harker,Kenneth Younger,andGuy Liddell.The